Monthly Archives: October 2013

Got an email this morning from Courage Campaign, informing me that the people behind prop 8 are now attacking a law that attempts to protect trans kids from discrimination and bullying. My immediate reaction is that being no longer able to beat up gay adults with prop 8, they looked for a more vulnerable target and chose trans children.

The rationale given for opposing this anti-bullying measure is the old narrative that a trans woman is just a man in drag, so they’re trying to keep boys out of the girl’s locker rooms. Look, the social fallout for being a teenage boy who sneaks into the girl’s locker room is very slight, often effectively non-existent, while the consequences of being perceived as trans, or just not hetero-normative, start with bullying and go all the way to murder. You’re bravely defending the strong from the weak, here.

Anyway, mobile posts encourage me to be brief so I’ll sign off here. Take care!

Like this:

Can’t sleep. Guess spending most of the last month in a mild doze has taken up all the sleep for a while. I’ll have to get at least a little though, stuff to do tomorrow and I need to get something vaguely resembling a stable sleep cycle by next week. I know how to fix this, wine & philosophy. I even have some chocolate if things get desperate.

Here’s a thought that blows my mind. The universe is 13.7 billion years old, and 48 billion light years in diameter. This means that, averaging since the beginning of time, the distance between the far edges of the universe grows at nearly twice the speed of light. Yet no object can move faster than light relative to any other object.

What’s happening is that spacetime itself is expanding. This is a difficult concept to wrap my head around, and I’m still not sure I get it, so bear with me. The usual simile I’ve read is a balloon with dots on it. As the balloon inflates and expands, the dots spread farther apart. In the same way, galaxies spread farther apart as spacetime expands. In every direction at once. I’m starting to get a headache again. Read the rest of this entry →

The title alone made me want to read this book. It also made me a little nervous, since a movie called The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies has demonstrated conclusively that a title can be more fun than the work itself, but never fear! This one happily lives up to its name.

The title also saves me the trouble of providing a plot summary. By and large you already have a pretty good idea what sorts of things happen in this story, a girl is taken to Fairyland and has adventures there. She meets strange people, encounters odd magic and weird rules. It has that surprising depth that you’ll find in all my favorite children’s books. The titular voyage itself takes up less of the story than I expected, happening near the end after most of the characters are well-established. Read the rest of this entry →

After nearly a month sick, spending all my time coughing and catching sleep whenever I could, I finally feel like myself again this morning. Not like I should, not back to normal or anything, but at least like a person instead of a half-conscious mucus machine.

In a little while I’m going to take a long hot shower and then try to scrape off the beard that’s accumulated. Then I’ll do laundry, some housecleaning, more laundry, and a little banking. Just generally catching up on the things I’ve let slide while I didn’t feel up to doing anything more vigorous than napping, playing video games, and if I really felt like stretching myself, reading. Interestingly, I learned that reading takes more energy than playing Final Fantasy. Probably has to do with focus.

While I sipped coffee and read blogs in the predawn light I was struck by how much I missed writing. That I could miss writing at all amuses me, not too many years ago the idea would be almost unthinkable, but the depth of longing is astounding. Especially given how rare it is for me to feel that I’ve written something worth reading. I suppose there are times when the act of creation is more important that the result.

I have not fully recovered. I will still be taking antibiotics for several days yet. However I know that I’m over my illness because this morning I want to work.

Which is good, because cleaning up the mess my illness has left will be a hell of a job. The beard alone is going to be a serious undertaking! So one more cup of coffee, a little catching up on the news, and then the shower. And when I’m finished with the base chores, I am going to write something. I don’t know what, yet. Maybe I still won’t know when I sit down to begin. But something. Perhaps I’ll post it here.

In the meantime, have a good day everyone. With luck I’ll post here again before too long.